Another link in the circumstantial evidence corroborating David Laing's statement is the fact that Smith was certainly at the moment in communication with Hamilton's personal friends, at whose instance the volume of poems was published. Kames, who was then interesting himself so actively in Smith's advancement, was the closest surviving friend Hamilton possessed. They had been constant companions in youth, leading spirits of that new school of dandies called "the beaux"—young men at once of fashion and of letters—who adorned Scotch society between the Rebellions, and continued to adorn many an after-dinner table in Edinburgh down till the present century. Hamilton owns that it was Kames who first taught him "verse to criticise," and wrote to him the poem "To H.H. at the Assembly"; while Kames for his part used in his old age, as his neighbour Ramsay of Ochtertyre informs us, to have no greater enjoyment than recounting the scenes and doings he and Hamilton had transacted together in those early days, of which the poet himself writes, when they "kept friendship's holy vigil" in the subterranean taverns of old Edinburgh "full many a fathom deep."
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Home and Hume, it may be mentioned, are only different ways of spelling the same name, which, though differently spelt, was not differently pronounced.
[20] Tytler's Life of Kames, i. 218.
[21] Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, i. 381.
[22] Clayden's Early Life of Samuel Rogers, p. 168.
[23] Stewart's Works, ed. Hamilton, vol. x. p. 68.
[24] Correspondence of James Oswald, Preface.
[25] Caldwell Papers, i. 93.
[26] Duncan's Notes and Documents illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow, p. 25.